Radio for hotels and hospitality

The sound in a hotel lobby is the second thing a guest notices and the first thing they cannot ignore. It is on for the whole of their stay, in every space they pass through, and it is almost always the least deliberate part of the design — a phone behind reception, a playlist somebody made in 2019, and whoever is on shift changing it when they get bored.

Hotel radio replaces that with something scheduled, consistent and controlled centrally. It is not a music service. It is the sound of the building, running to a plan.

Zones, not a playlist

The defining feature of hospitality audio, and the thing a single playlist cannot do, is that a hotel is several rooms with different jobs happening at once.

Lobby and reception — the brand's voice. Present, unobtrusive, consistent. This is the zone guests hear most and the one that most affects how the property reads.

Bar and lounge — changes across the day more than any other space. Quiet and instrumental at four, something with a pulse at nine.

Restaurant — service-period dependent, and quieter than anyone in the industry sets it. Music that forces guests to raise their voices makes a room feel crowded, and a room that feels crowded turns tables faster and rates worse.

Spa and pool — the one zone where getting it wrong is unmistakable. Continuous, unmetered, no vocals, no abrupt transitions. A spa playing something with a chorus is a spa that has stopped being a spa.

Corridors, lifts and back of house — low, continuous, uncontroversial.

In-room — a guest-facing channel, reachable on the TV system or from a phone.

Each of those is a schedule, not a folder. A station platform runs all of them from one place, on a clock, so the bar changes character at six because it is six and not because somebody remembered.

Why not a consumer streaming service

Because it is a licensing violation, and because it does not do the job.

The terms of every consumer music service — Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, YouTube Music — prohibit use in a commercial premises. This is not a technicality nobody enforces; collecting societies do check, and the account is in somebody's personal name, which makes the exposure personal too.

Separately, it does not work operationally. A consumer service has no zones, no schedule, no announcements, no way to stop a member of staff changing it, and no way to make forty properties in a group sound like one brand. Every hotel that has tried it has the same story: it was fine until a guest heard something inappropriate at breakfast.

Announcements, sparingly

A station can carry the property's own voice as well as its music, and hospitality is one of the few settings where restraint matters more than opportunity.

What works: a short mention of the bar's opening hours in the lobby zone, the spa's treatment menu in the corridor to the spa, tomorrow's breakfast times. Twice an hour at most, produced properly, never in a stack.

What does not: anything resembling a commercial. A guest who is paying to be there does not want to be sold to in the lift, and the difference between a helpful note and an advert is obvious to everyone except the person who wrote it.

Multi-property groups get a real advantage here: a group-level announcement can be pushed to every hotel at once, and a single property's local content sits alongside it.

Consistency across a group

For anyone running more than one property, this is the whole argument.

A hotel group with a defined brand has a defined sound, and enforcing it through a document nobody reads does not work. Running it as a scheduled station does: the same clock, the same music policy, the same day-parting in every property, changed once centrally and applied everywhere.

The exceptions are then deliberate rather than accidental — a resort that genuinely needs a different evening character gets a variation on the group schedule, not a member of staff's phone.

Licensing: the honest version

Playing recorded music anywhere a guest can hear it is a public performance and requires a licence. This is true of the lobby, the bar, the restaurant, the spa, the pool, the corridors, the lifts and the gym. It is true whether the source is a station, a CD, a radio or a phone.

In the UK, TheMusicLicence from PPL PRS Ltd covers both the composition and the recording in one. Hotels are a standard category with tariffs based on the spaces in use.

In the US, licences are required from the performing rights organisations — ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and potentially GMR — and each covers a different catalogue, so a property playing broad commercial music generally needs more than one. The "homestyle exemption" that covers small premises playing an ordinary radio or television receiver does not extend to a streamed service of your own.

Elsewhere, a national collecting society handles it. The obligation is essentially universal.

A separate question: if the station is also reachable on the open internet — a guest listening from home, a channel on your website — that is webcasting, and it needs its own licensing on top of the premises licence.

No platform includes this in its fee, and any that appears to is selling you a licensed background-music service rather than a station. What a station platform gives you is a complete play log, which is what the societies want and what makes the annual return quick.

What it costs

• Platform — $10–40 a month for a property, and the cost per property falls sharply across a group.
• Playback hardware — a small streaming player per zone at $50–100. Existing amplifiers and ceiling speakers are unchanged.
• Licensing — the significant recurring cost, priced on your spaces and capacity.
• Production — a set of properly voiced announcements is $100–500 once.

For most properties this is a few hundred pounds a year of infrastructure against a licensing cost that was already owed.

Mistakes that show up

Music that lurches. A library assembled from many sources will jump in loudness between tracks unless it is levelled — one track shouting, the next inaudible. In a bar it is annoying; in a spa it undoes the entire treatment. This is a measurement problem, and it is solved by loudness levelling at the platform rather than by a member of staff riding a volume knob.

One zone for the whole building. The spa and the bar cannot share a schedule. If the budget allows only two zones, make them spa and everywhere-else.

Too loud at breakfast. Morning volume should be set at breakfast, by someone standing in the room, not at four in the afternoon when it is empty.

Staff control of the volume. Give them a locked ceiling. Somebody will always turn it up.

A short loop. Front-of-house staff hear the same hours every shift for months. If the rotation is small enough for them to predict the next track, guests are hearing repeats too.

Frequently asked questions

Do hotels need a music licence to play background music?

Yes — every guest-accessible space is a public performance. In the UK that is TheMusicLicence from PPL PRS; in the US it is licences from the performing rights organisations. The licence is required regardless of the source of the music.

Can we use Spotify or Apple Music in our hotel?

No. Consumer streaming services explicitly prohibit commercial use in their terms, and the subscription does not confer any public performance right. It is also operationally unworkable across zones.

How many zones does a hotel need?

At minimum, two: the spa or pool, and everything else. A full-service property typically runs four to six — lobby, bar, restaurant, spa, corridors and in-room — because those spaces genuinely need different schedules at the same moment.

Can we play different music at different times of day automatically?

Yes, and it is the main reason to run it as a station rather than a playlist. Each zone gets a schedule that changes character by hour and by day of the week, without anyone touching anything.

Can guests listen to the hotel's station from home?

They can, and some properties do it deliberately as a brand extension. It makes the stream a public webcast, which needs webcasting licensing in addition to the premises licence.